Janet Kwasniak's blog on consciousness and the brain

Tag Archives: rhythm

Science Daily has an item (here) on musical appreciation in chimpanzees. Previous studies using blues, classical and pop music have found that although chimps can distinguish features of music and have preferences, they still preferred silence to the music. So were the chimps able to ‘hear’ the music but not appreciate its beauty? A new paper has different results using non-western music: West African akan, North Indian raga, and Japanese taiko. Here the chimps liked the African and Indian music but not the Japanese. They seemed to base their appreciation on the rhythm. The Japanese music has very regular prominent beats like western music, while the African and Indian music had varied beats. “The African and Indian music in the experiment had extreme ratios of strong to weak beats, whereas the Japanese music had regular strong beats, which is also typical of Western music.”

It may be that they like a more sophisticated rhythm. Or de Waal says, ““Chimpanzees may perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects.””

“All primates have an ability to distinguish between temporal and melodic features of music, but unlike humans, in previous studies, nonhuman primates have not demonstrated a preference for music. However, previous research has not tested the wide range of acoustic parameters present in many different types of world music. The purpose of the present study is to determine the spontaneous preference of common chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) for 3 acoustically contrasting types of world music: West African akan, North Indian raga, and Japanese taiko. Sixteen chimpanzees housed in 2 groups were exposed to 40 min of music from a speaker placed 1.5 m outside the fence of their outdoor enclosure; the proximity of each subject to the acoustic stimulus was recorded every 2 min. When compared with controls, subjects spent significantly more time in areas where the acoustic stimulus was loudest in African and Indian music conditions. This preference for African and Indian music could indicate homologies in acoustic preferences between nonhuman and human primates.”